If you rarely got to see letters and just saw fragments of words as something like Chinese characters (tokens), could you count the R's in arbitrary words well?
The bigger issue is LLMs still need way way more data than humans get tons what they do. But they also have many less parameters than the human brain.
> If you rarely got to see letters and just saw fragments of words as something like Chinese characters (tokens), could you count the R's in arbitrary words well?
While this seems correct, I'm sure I tried this when it was novel and observed that it could split the word into separate letters and then still count them wrong, which suggested something weird is happening internally.
I just now tried to repeat this, and it now counts the "r"'s in "strawberry" correctly (presumably enough examples of this specifically on the internet now?), but I did find it making the equivalent mistake with a German word (https://chatgpt.com/share/6859289d-f56c-8011-b253-eccd3cecee...):
But even then, having it spell the word out first, fixed it: https://chatgpt.com/share/685928bc-be58-8011-9a15-44886bb522...